Wednesday, January 16, 2013

It is All About Making Money or "Things I Don't Care About"

Sometimes people are confused about their priorities. I spend a lot of time talking to investors about the economy and the markets. The goal of all this talk is to make money. One thing I have noticed is that oftentimes these discussions will disintegrate into monologues or worse rants about politics, personal views, their dislike about one group or another, etc. When you are talking about making money it is "all about making money, nothing else". Most of the stuff one hears about on the news or the entertainment shows "masquerading as news" is irrelevant. The recent case in point was the all the talk about about the "$1 trillin coin". You have got to be kidding me.Below is an article I recently found that basically echoes my sentiments. By the way, if you are looking for a good source of reliable information about the economy and markets spend some time paging through the The Big Picture by Barry Ritholtz.

Last year, I noted in the Price of Paying Attention that listening to all of the noise out there hurts your investing returns. If you digest a lot separate sources, if you crave input, if you are entertained by current events, you run the risk of getting distracted by a huge amount of meaningless junk.

These have helped me steer clear of distracting, biased, unhelpful or misleading noise. I learned this weekend that there is an enormous amount of nonsense that simply falls off your radar when you work this way.

Consider this list of things I do not have even the slightest interest in:

• Who the next Treasury Secretary will be• The Herbalife hedge fund battle• 90% of Wall Street Research• People who don’t believe in Evolution• The Fiscal Cliff• Dell Going Private• Why Ben Bernake is going to cause hyper-inflation!• 75% of what is on CNBC• Any reality television• Those QE and Gold cartoons from ExtraNormal• Lance Armstrong’s doping• What the European Central Bank will do next• Nouriel Roubini’s parties• Birthers, 9/11 Conspiracists, Global Warming Denialists• Lindsay Lohan’s next movie/arrest/rehab visit

That’s just off the top of my head.

There are millions of things that I have no interest in. The list of items I specifically mentioned are what I believe have a negative value — they are worth less than zero — these are meaningless distractions that take my attention away from more important things.

I am not claiming to have found the holy grail, but I have learned what makes me more productive and efficient. Note that the vast majority of the things I don’t care about are coincidentally also items I have no control over.

If you want to find more time to focus on what you are supposed to be doing, then you must eliminate the junk. It could be worth about 1000 hours of found time per year to you.

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